New Year, New Hobby Challenges! pt 1

Happy New Year! And it’s that time again… Whether you call them goals, resolutions, challenges, or whatever, it seems every hobbyist out there with a blog, site or page is setting out their stall and declaring their hobby challenges!

Well, this being the first day of the year, I wanted to share something similar…that was also a bit different and unique!

I’m not great with getting through my hobby backlog, like every hobby butterfly. I have armies stretching back to late 5th edition – I started with a big bunch of old style Dark Eldar, then moved to Chaos Space Marines with the 6th edition starter set and went in all sorts of ways after that!

Getting the Armies & Legions & Hordes book from Dave Taylor through his Kickstarter campaign helped a bit with getting me to organize what I’ve got, write it out in Google Sheets online and track the build & painting progress of each unit or model. I have most of my orks listed, but need to crack the whip and get my Horus Heresy Alpha Legion in the spreadsheet as well!

General Goals

Now, I don’t like to use the word ‘resolutions’ – it’s been around too long and has been too easy to fail. It seems like by the second week of January all the posts on Facebook are jokes about people missing their resolution. I prefer the word GOALS.

GOALS are good – in sports, a GOAL is a good thing! Getting a GOAL is fantastic, and makes you, your team, your fans and every one of your supporters feel great! So GOALS it is.

So I have a few overall hobby-related goals I’d like to achieve in 2020.

Some of the part-painted Alpha Legion models on the left side of this 2v2 battle!

The main goal is to build and paint all the Alpha Legion models I have, to at least a tabletop standard. This year will have a lot of Horus Heresy games, I think! This means priming, basing, trim, basing on the models that have bases, transfers, and weathering (essentially just airbrushing the bases) . I’m not looking to enter these in Golden Demon or other painting competitions, I just want them to look cool on the tabletop. I don’t have a good points count of my Alpha Legion yet, but it occupies several KR cases and other boxes in the loft, that’s for sure!

They’re slightly more painted now, but this mostly-black mass of orks should get finished this year!

The second goal is to do the same thing with my ork army for 40K. 2019 was all about 40K and getting cool models, so now my ork army is quite large, definitely bigger than my Alpha Legion army. But most of the models are built now, and they should be easier to paint. 90% of the models that have bases are based, so for the most part they just need priming with black, hit some panels with white, heavy drybrushing with dark to light silver paints, then some transfers and weathering (which is also airbrushing the bases).

Those are the goals for my main armies – after this there’s loads of terrain! Plastic Necromunda terrain from Games Workshop, MDF ramp and platform terrain from Wargames Tournaments, plus lots of small scatter terrain that should be somewhat quicker to do, at least to tabletop standard.

There’s plenty more to do (new Chaos Space Marines, plus Chaos and Cerastus Knights…), but I’ll leave the list here for now!

That’s also where I’ll leave the goal-posting (get it?) for now – look for a New Hobby Year, New Challenges Part 2 post very soon!

In the meantime, if you want to book an army, unit or model to get built, customized or painted (or all 3!), get in touch!